Canadians celebrating their Olympic gold-medal hockey win in 2002. No doubt the streets of Canada look similar today.Credit Mike Cassese/Reuters

Alice Munro, the Canadian writer who’s widely acknowledged as the greatest living short-story writer (and, according to Jonathan Franzen, the best living North American fiction writer, period), was named the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature this morning.

This news was warmly greeted by literature lovers, short-story advocates, late-blooming aspiring fiction writers (Munro published her first collection of short stories at age 37) and, perhaps most of all, Canadians, unleashing a wave of national excitement last experienced when Ben Johnson broke the ribbon in the 100-meter dash at the Seoul Olympics in 1988. (Unfortunately, we know how that story turned out.)

This jubilation is no surprise; as a Canadian expat, I’ve often found myself trying to explain to Americans that in Canada, writers are the rock stars. And the movie stars. Rolled into one. If there were a Canadian Mount Rushmore, it wouldn’t memorialize four politicians. They would be Munro, Atwood, Ondaatje and . . . maybe Robertson Davies. Or Mordecai Richler. (Canadians, help me out here.)

Munro’s win, however, has also loosed a wave of questions about whether she is, in fact, the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The other contender here is Saul Bellow, whose parents were Russian immigrants to Canada, who was born in Montreal in 1915, and who lived in Canada until he moved with his family to Chicago when he was 9 years old. All of which qualifies him, of course, as Canadian.

Bellow, however, became a naturalized American citizen in 1941, decades before he won the Nobel Prize in 1976. He is often referred to as “the Canadian-born American writer Saul Bellow” and by most accounts considered himself to be an American. Perhaps most crucially, he wrote, in “The Adventures of Augie March,” what is perhaps the greatest opening line about being an American in the history of American literature (and one of the greatest opening lines ever): “I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Sure, Bellow is not speaking for himself here, but come on: It’s a sentiment that’s so American it could be inscribed in the Statue of Liberty.

So the question of whether or not Bellow qualified as a Canadian Nobel Laureate has always been a thorny one. When I lived in Canada (to complicate matters I, like Augie March, am American-born), my friends and I had a running joke about exactly which notable figures qualified as Canadian. Short answer: All of them.

Were you born in Canada, then left as a child to do your most notable work elsewhere (like Bellow or the comedian Phil Hartman)? You’re Canadian. Were you born abroad but moved to and now live in and still do your best work in Canada (like the writer Rohinton Mistry)? Well, of course, you’re Canadian, too. Were you born elsewhere but did something notable while temporarily living in Canada (like, say, Alexander Graham Bell, who maybe invented the telephone while living in Canada — depending on how you define “invented” and “telephone”)? No matter — Canada will happily claim you.

In part, this was an expression of a distinct and noteworthy sense of Canadian openness, which always tends to err on the side of inclusion. (In Canada, you rarely hear talk of who is, or isn’t, a “true Canadian.”) And in part, it was a joke about how eager we Canadians were to claim a stake in any and all accomplishments, no matter how tangential our connection, and no matter whether said accomplishments happened within, or relatively close to, or really very far from, our own shores.

With Munro, however, there are no such caveats. There is no need for any asterisk.

Whether Canada had a Nobel Laureate writer before today is an argument for some other time, or perhaps one that’s best put to rest for good. Because Canada inarguably has a one now.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…